Embedded Systems

CollabNet TeamForge Strengthens Git Grrrr-Factor

By Adrian Bridgwater, December 18, 2012

Enterprise-grade distributed version control with centralized governance

CollabNet has announced new TeamForge enhancements designed to strengthen Git as an enterprise-grade source code management (SCM) option for IT organizations. The company says that TeamForge with Git and Gerrit improves code safety with tamper-proof audit compliance and what the firm calls "history protection".

NOTE 1: History protection ensures that potentially unnoticed events, such as remote branch deletions and forced pushes, are now detected and fully recoverable. With standard Git offerings it is comparatively easy to destroy history forever, or replace it with an alternative version using Git's history rewrite feature. With TeamForge's history protection, those changes are always detected and can be rolled back again if necessary.

NOTE 2: Gerrit is a web-based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version-control system. Gerrit aims to make reviews easier by showing changes in a side-by-side display, and allowing inline comments to be added by any reviewer. TeamForge includes Gerrit to enforce both manual and automatic (using Jenkins) code review workflows.

This product news is intended to bring TeamForge to a point where it can make advanced Git/Gerrit code review workflows usable for the masses. This then shields administrators from technical complexity by providing review templates that work immediately.

CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli suggests that in the enterprise there are "dozens to thousands" of Git developers who will collaborate on branching, coding, and merging — and a loss of data could shatter the schedule of an application project and the other projects and teams that rely on that code.

"The power of Git within the context of TeamForge is global collaboration with enterprise safeguards such as governance and history protection — within a social, community architecture," he said. Portelli goes on to say that having Git history protection within TeamForge provides value for individual and team software development. However, the impact of code saved by history protection can be far reaching across an organization, such as when this code is branched and merged on a repeated basis across multiple product lines with minor feature changes, such as for organizations building device drivers, printing software and mobile phones.

There's more here from CollabNet as the community architecture of TeamForge, combined with history protection, is supposed to be well suited to branching and merging using Git scales for larger projects across geographies and the enterprise. This is particularly true when standard horizontal applications are developed and then slightly modified across various vertical business segments or geographies.

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